Fighting AT&T to Get Back My Unlimited Data Plan Was Pure Hell

I didn’t realize it until recently, but I’ve been locked in a tug of war with a $260 billion company. AT&T and I are fighting over the same thing: My unlimited data plan, an old relic of the previous decade, when the original iPhone first dropped.

I’ve spent hours on the phone arguing with customer-service representatives. I’ve spent a lot of that time on hold—for stretches of 30 minutes or more. I’ve visited AT&T’s retail stores probably too many times. All to get my plan back, which AT&T took away without my knowledge or consent when I upgraded my phone in September 2016. In the end I got it back, but it wasn’t easy. Technically, the company graciously lets customers keep their data plan no matter what, but the reality is it’s a little more complicated than that.

Because for years, apart from this policy, AT&T has actually been hell-bent on taking this unlimited-data plan away from customers who still cling to it. AT&T won’t say how many of these plans are still around, but a 2014 Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against AT&T named 3.5 million unlimited-data customers. In other words, 3.5 million longtime, locked-in, loyal customers. AT&T’s been brazen about it too; Walter Piecyk, a mobile-industry analyst at BTIG Research, told me that AT&T used to boast in its quarterly earnings reports how many customers it’d recently switched away from its data plans.

The company, which first stopped offering unlimited data in 2010, came up with all sorts of conniving ways to turn people off of these plans. In 2011 AT&T started slowing data speeds almost to a halt when a user exceeds a specified amount of data (first 2 gigabytes, then 5 gigabytes, and currently 22 gigabytes since 2015), a practice called “throttling” that was so unethical—or certainly the opposite of “unlimited”—that the FTC sued AT&T for this in 2014. In the past the company has also accused many users of tethering their phones to their computers to access the internet, even though many of these people were reportedly old, or had no concept of tethering. Alternatively, starting in 2009, the Federal Communications Commission alleged that AT&T, without telling its customers, simply swapped their customers’ unlimited data plan for a metered-data plan that incurs lucrative data-overage charges. (For this, the company settled with the FCC in 2012 for $700,000).

And that’s exactly what the company did to me—in 2016, years after that settlement. And getting my plan back felt like a battle.

The crazy thing is, I made damn sure before I upgraded my phone that I could keep my plan, and that the transition would be smooth. Every AT&T and Apple employee I thought to speak with assured me it would be.

My first sign of trouble came when I pre-ordered an iPhone 7: I didn’t have the option of keeping this plan. It would be simple, though, all the customer-service people told me. All I have to do is bring my new phone into an AT&T store and they’d make sure my plan was on it.

Unfortunately, when I returned to the store, new phone in hand, the employees there were puzzled. For some reason, they couldn’t select my plan in my profile. In fact, they weren’t sure what was going on at all, and they suggested I call customer service.

That’s when I started to suspect my whole plan—and, of course, my data plan—was unraveling.

But when I called customer service I was assured by the woman on the phone (with a bit of uncertainty in her voice) that my plan was still there … but it would be a good idea to check back in a few days. When I did, I was assured that, yes, I still had my plan. Although it appears as if this first level of customer-service employee doesn’t have permissions to access and select plans like mine (Piecyk, the BTIG analyst, told me he suspects the same).

Then came the emails and texts from AT&T—the kind that an unlimited-data customer never sees. Apparently as my kid was binging on YouTube Kids while we were out to lunch (one of the most underrated perks of an unlimited-data plan for any parent), I’d reached my data limit and was immediately charged $20 for 300 additional megabytes of data.

It was Sunday afternoon, and instead of enjoying my weekend, I was furious. I started second-guessing everything. Did I really have an unlimited-data plan? When exactly was it switched? (Also, “300 megabytes”? What a crappy plan I’d been switched to!)

Back to customer service. At a time when I needed someone empathetic and knowledgeable, the poor woman who helped me was neither. She couldn’t determine my plan, then when she did, she told me that I actually never had an unlimited-data plan. Was I sure that I did?

This was going nowhere fast, and it was at this point that I demanded to speak to her supervisor. She didn’t make it easy, though; she insisted on trying to help me. I responded by demanding to speak to her boss. She warned me it’d take awhile, as he was busy. I said I’d wait.

She was at least right about that last part. Because I ended up on hold for 45 minutes.

Periodically the same woman would speak up, to variously try and sell me new plans, or attempt to convince me I had confused my wife’s phone line with the one I was calling about. The argument was so circular it reminded me of the Comcast customer service debacle that went viral, and made me question whether this was an elaborate prank.

When I finally reached the supervisor, he took care of everything. We talked for only a couple minutes. He was strangely efficient and dispassionate, taking everything down and promising a resolution in 10 days. It’s almost disorienting to have someone listen to you and help you out after spending an hour—or really, a few weeks—feeling slightly paranoid, or at least trapped in an echo chamber.

The whole ordeal, at least until reaching this final piece of the puzzle, may have all been in earnest; it almost certainly involved incompetence. But when taken altogether, the entire experience, from an entirely neutral perspective, felt like a calculated test of your resistance. A battle of wills. Some kind of twisted, astronaut-style endurance training, where the psychological torture will end if only you just hang up the phone and accept defeat.

Whatever the intention, it wasn’t the ideal customer service interaction, according to customer-service expert Shep Hyken.

“The best call centers, when sensing frustration, will quickly try and help move you to a supervisor,” he told me.

Some call centers pressure this first line of customer-service personnel—the catcher’s mitt for the company—to take care of as much as possible, and try to keep things away from a supervisor. Naturally, some employees take this to ridiculous lengths.

“This particular industry has a black eye,” Hyken said. “They’ve been beat up so many times, and you know what? It’s been deserved. But they’ve done with they can to bring themselves out of the basement and into a better place. In fact, AT&T is currently tied with Verizon in second [among wireless carriers] according to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index.”

AT&T doesn’t want its customers on unlimited-data plans for two simple reasons: All this data usage, or potentially unfettered data usage, congests the company’s networks, which could lead to more customer dissatisfaction, and requires a lot of investment to expand infrastructure. The second reason is that unlimited-data plans ruin any mobile carrier’s business strategy of continually upselling to its customers. Because if you already have access to an infinite amount of data, even the greatest salesperson won’t be able to upgrade you from 10 gigs to 15 gigs, then 15 gigs to 20 gigs, and so on. And any strategy that pursues flat revenue is unthinkable in a massive, corporation like AT&T. The company is actually currently offering new unlimited-data plans for a limited time, as an enticement when customers sign up for U-Verse or DirecTV.

Any strategy that will potentially incense customers is a balancing act—viewed in cold, cost-benefit terms by the company. So if AT&T thought it could withstand the PR shitstorm caused by simply cancelling all of these grandfathered unlimited-data plans, it would do this immediately. Verizon, in fact, did it in January—unilaterally cancelling the old unlimited-data plans of heavy users who were burning through 200 gigabytes or more per month. For everyone else with these old plans, Verizon jacked up the monthly fee by $20 in 2015, a 60% increase.

The thing is, there’s no law that allows customers to keep their plan, according to an FCC spokesman. Once your contract is up it’s essentially an at-will agreement, meaning either party can cancel. So I and my fellow grandfathered-in holdouts can’t realistically expect to have unlimited data my whole life. The reality is, I’m only keeping my plan at AT&T’s pleasure.

In other words, I’m relying on the goodwill of a Fortune 10 company that’s sued all the time by regulators, and habitually switches plans on its customers and sneaks phony charges onto their bills.

Wish me luck.

from Fighting AT&T to Get Back My Unlimited Data Plan Was Pure Hell

Hundreds of Customers Complained to the FCC That AT&T Switched Their Data Plans

Back in November 2016, Consumer Reports announced the results of a survey that didn’t feel like news at all: People really hate their cell phone carriers. And while feeling screwed is almost part of the deal of owning a mobile phone, Motherboard has learned, via complaints to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) obtained by a Freedom of Information Act Request, that hundreds of irate customers literally think they’re being cheated by AT&T.

Among more than 500 complaints in the past three years, hundreds allege that the company is either changing customers’ plans without their consent, or attempting to do so by exerting pressure or promising cost savings.

These are serious allegations—because in 2012, the mobile giant settled with the FCC in a consent decree (meaning there was no admission of guilt) for $700,000 after numerous customers complained that AT&T changed their data plans without their knowledge or consent (usually away from the highly coveted unlimited data plans that are no longer offered, except to U-Verse or DirecTV subscribers).

I knew this was happening because it happened to me: AT&T switched my old unlimited-data plan when I upgraded my phone in 2016, and after all the work it took to get back on my old plan, I decided to see how many other people AT&T had done this to.

Sure enough, the list of complaints Motherboard reviewed contained more than 50 instances of customers alleging that their plans were switched on them without their knowledge or consent. These all happened from 2013 to late 2016—after the consent decree.

Here are some examples of the complaints:

“AT&T store employees switched some of my wireless phone lines from unlimited monthly data plans to 3G per month without my consent when I purchased a new phone in January 2014. They refuse to restore my original plan.”

“My Unlimited Data Plan was switched to a 10gb data plan! Neither myself or anyone on my plan changed it. ATT will not change it back, even though it was done by one of their employees without my knowledge or consent. They investigated and know this.”

“ … my daughters phone has had unlimited data since she had her first smart phone. Once before, the ATT company had changed her plan without my consent (I am the only one authorized to make changes) and we had to have it restored. It recently came to our attention that it had been switched again, without my consent.”

“I called AT&T for customer support with an iPhone voicemail issue on 5/15/16. During the call I repeatedly and explicitly told them I wanted absolutely no changes made to my plan. Upon logging into my account online I found that they had switched me off of my grandfathered unlimited data plan without permission. “

(All the customers’ personal information is redacted, so Motherboard was unable to reach out to them directly.)

When reached for comment on the sum of these complaints, an AT&T spokesperson suggested its customers utilize the company’s various tools for monitoring data usage, or switch to a newer plans that don’t incur overage charges. She also said that my own plan was switched inadvertently.

So why would AT&T do this to its own customers? As you might imagine, every unlimited-data plan is a hindrance to the company. According to Walter Piecyk, a mobile industry analyst at BTIG Research, data usage is growing, and it costs big money for carriers to provide the capacity that its customers want. And since AT&T is one of the dominant operators, increasing revenue from existing consumers is more feasible to the company than growing its customers.

“So the only way for AT&T to grow revenue is to get you to pay more [for data],” Piecyk says. “Once you buy unlimited, you don’t really need a bigger bucket. But if they sign you up for a 10-gigabyte plan, they’re gonna get more out of you when you go to a 15-, 20-, 25- or 30-gigabyte plan.” This also ensures that AT&T can continually upsell to its customers over time. AT&T could just increase its unlimited-data rates for those customers—and it has—but from a marketing perspective, upselling has the more palatable appearance of providing incremental value than a simple rate increase does.

It’s hard to know what the FCC’s criteria is for launching new investigations; its spokespeople declined to comment on how many complaints it might take, or the severity of these complaints. AT&T won’t disclose how many subscribers are still on the grandfathered unlimited data plan, but a lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2014 alleged there were 3.5 million customers on the plan at the time.

But it wasn’t just unlimited data plans that people feel were targeted; people frequently complained of being talked into restricted-data plans by customer service representatives who assured customers that they wouldn’t exceed the plan’s data limits (but often did); or of being promised deals that came with free phones and lower monthly payments where neither the phone turned out to be technically free, nor were their monthly payments cheaper. There were plenty of stories of data use skyrocketing immediately after switching to a new plan—either from a different carrier or from another AT&T plan—resulting in data overages, usually charged at $10–$20 per extra gigabyte.

Reading hundreds of customer complaints can be a dispiriting exercise. There are sad stories of seniors or others on fixed incomes owing thousands of dollars and not understanding why, or where to turn to. Or small business owners unable to run their business. Many complaints are sloppily written, while others contain obsessively recorded details—and yes, a few are written in all capital letters. Many complaints are written angrily, and with the assumption that AT&T is purposely trying to fleece customers.

But reading hundreds of complaints also reveals what can feel like a bird’s-eye view of a company’s practices. Until August 17, 2016, on most tiered data plans when a customer uses more than their monthly allotted data, they automatically get charged $10–$20 per extra gigabyte. AT&T has 133 million wireless customers in the U.S., and it doesn’t take much imagination to realize how profitable data overages can be for the company.

Even those old unlimited-data plans seem to figure into the data grab: In hundreds of complaints, one of the most frequent terms is “throttling,” a controversial practice that mostly ended in 2015, where AT&T would slow down an unlimited plan user’s data speeds by up to 90 percent starting at just 2GB (later increased to 5GB), rendering the plan essentially useless—and definitely not unlimited. Faced with separate lawsuits last year by the FCC and the FTC, in September 2015 AT&T more than quadrupled the throttling threshold to 22GB, and it now remains in effect only “if in an area where the network is experiencing congestion.” Prior to then, the authorities and many customers viewed throttling as an underhanded way to hustle people off of the unlimited data plans and onto tiered data plans—where speeds are never slowed down, regardless of how much data one uses (and pays for). Those FCC and FTC suits also alleged that when customers switched away from unlimited data plans, they’d get hit with an early termination fee, which AT&T also eventually stopped doing.

Piecyk says that the overall strategy of moving customers onto metered data plans is “absolutely a business plan of AT&T.” But from a customer perspective, treating its longtime, most locked-in consumers like this, prying away the only plan that keeps them loyal to AT&T, seems counterintuitive.

Turns out, it’s strictly business. Cold, calculated business.

“[From AT&T’s perspective], it’s a calculated risk of the number of customers who are going to be upset by that, versus the impact of letting people stay on unlimited data—or letting more people on an unlimited-data plan—and it degraded my network,” Piecyk says. “I’m going to lose even more customers because everyone’s performance is going to decrease.”

But the mobile giant is presumably listening to its customers, because every time someone complains to the FCC about their phone company, cable company, or radio or TV station, that complaint gets sent to the company in question. And in August 2016, AT&T rolled out its Mobile Share Advantage plans, which eliminate overage charges for customers. Instead, “data speeds are slowed down for the rest of the bill cycle,” according to an AT&T spokesperson.

Is it a very small start? Maybe. But it’ll take likely take a lot more for people to think happy thoughts about their cell phone provider. On December 8, 2016, the FTC announced that AT&T will pay out more than $88 million to more than 2.5 million customers who were charged without their consent for “premium text message services” on their bill, a practice known in the industry as “cramming.”

For perspective, AT&T made $146 billion in revenue in 2015. And so government agencies can fine and litigate the company all they want, but it seems that no matter how many lawsuits it faces and millions of dollars in settlements it agrees to pay out, AT&T appears to have a hard time resisting the urge to sign its customers up for things they didn’t ask for.

from Hundreds of Customers Complained to the FCC That AT&T Switched Their Data Plans